There’s no part of the advertising and marketing world that hasn’t been touched by AI. With technological leaps seemingly happening every day, companies need savvy executives comfortable on the frontiers of what’s to come.
ADWEEK’s AI Power 50 recognizes the leaders driving our industry’s adoption of artificial intelligence tools, from the data and engineering talent coding algorithms to the creative and strategic professionals using AI in innovative ways.
As our day-to-day work is transformed, these executives are ensuring their companies are keeping pace.
Marie Aiello
With leaner budgets and shrinking teams across the industry, Marie Aiello led the development of a customized platform that uses AI to help brands build comprehensive, personalized campaigns with limited time and resources. ContinuumGlobal’s Smart Marketing Engine streamlines asset production, generates and deploys email copy, conducts market research, and handles governance and approvals, giving users a full end-to-end business solution. It’s also capable of QA, workflow automation, and creative intelligence for additional insights, freeing up marketers to focus on big-picture thinking while the program manages the logistics of omnichannel campaigns in an instant.
Jeremy Fain & Dr. Aaron Andalman
As a Stanford- and MIT-educated neuroscientist, Dr. Aaron Andalman brings a unique clinical expertise to human behavior that was key to developing Cognitiv, an AI marketing company focused on understanding consumer intent and making predictive decisions instead of static optimization. He was key to developing and scaling its ContextGPT media planning tool, which got a major upgrade in 2025 with natural language prompts and grew a staggering 388% thanks to a partnership with OpenAI brokered by CEO Jeremy Fain. Together, the pair have kept Cognitiv at the forefront of technological advancement.
Kipp Bodnar
When AI Overviews began taking traffic from HubSpot’s blog, a trusted industry resource, Kipp Bodnar created an answer engine optimization strategy to ensure its valuable content wasn’t lost in the digital ether. Users came to trust the brand even more: Citations improved 433% and AI-referred demand rose by 1,850%. Today, HubSpot’s CRM has the highest share of voice, and visitors from AI platforms tripled compared with traditional search conversions and spend more per visit. Eager to spread the knowledge, Bodnar bottled his insights into a four-step playbook that marketers can look to as they undergo their own digital transformations.
Dean Broadhead
The proprietary AI platforms built by Dean Broadhead have reshaped his namesake agency’s internal and external operations. Today, more than 80% of employees use his signature GPT, Butter, to hash out scope, briefs, media planning, and more, with adoption more than doubling in the second half of 2025. Last year, he added four new programs focused on marketing mix, consumer insights, visibility, and sports marketing that have netted broadhead 25 new clients and 30% growth year-over-year. His forward thinking earned broadhead a spot on Inc.’s 2025 Best in Business list as the Best AI Implementation winner—the sole agency to be included.
Chad Broude
To spur an AI revolution at Chicago-based Highdive, Chad Broude delivered a mandate on the level of John F. Kennedy’s “We Choose to Go to the Moon” speech. Creativity still comes first but always with an eye to what AI can make possible, such as when he negotiated a first-of-its-kind Commercial AI Voiceover Addendum with SAG-Aftra to recreate Jeep’s brand voice after the actor faced a medical emergency, keeping them paid and the campaign on schedule. He also led the development of Highdive’s Deep-Learning Infrastructure for Generative Image Training (DIGIT), its proprietary engine that builds custom AI models tailored to each client.
Luigi de Rosa
Spotify’s year-end Wrapped playlists opened the door to innovation in music curation, and Active Theory’s Luigi de Rosa was ready with the next hit. Song Psychic answers Spotify users’ questions like “Should I quit my job?” and “Will I find love?” with the perfect tune, prompting otherworldly engagement and share numbers. The Italy-based developer focuses on creating “emotional AI” programs that work by responding to feelings, rather than trying to guess what a person wants based on their demographics. Fiercely protective of AI ethics, de Rosa teamed up with Accenture Song on the anti-deepfake First AI-ID Kit project that was an awards season darling.
Tyler Denk
Newsletters hold great promise but are notoriously difficult to scale due to manual purchasing, inconsistent creative, and monetization hurdles. Tyler Denk infused the beehiiv newsletter platform with AI tools that analyze content, audience traits, and historical performance to match brands and publishers. The revamped beehiiv Ad Network—which comes on the heels of the group’s acquisition of fellow newsletter platform Swapstack—is one of the fastest-growing performance channels in newsletter marketing and one of the company’s largest revenue drivers. With new machine learning optimizations in place, publishers’ ad income doubled from $500,000 per month at the start of 2025 to more than $1 million by the end.
Jamie Domenici
Knowing that AI is a lot more than a digital taskmaster, Jamie Domenici wants CRM users to see it as a personalized solution finder along the conversion process. At Klaviyo’s annual conference in September, she introduced the group’s new Marketing Agent and Customer Agent, which build campaigns and handle customer service, respectively. People took a quick liking to Customer Agent especially: In five months, it resolved 62% of support tickets autonomously and cut resolution times by 35%. Domenici is also the face of the Klaviyo AI Shopping Index, which helps marketers understand how consumers are using AI.
James Finn
To encourage AI adoption across Audible’s Brand & Content Marketing team, James Finn did the usual learning sessions and culture shifts. Then he went a step further, crafting the approachable chatbot Sonny&Cher that can spit out BEAT (Brand Equity and Awareness Tracker) insights instantly, transforming complex data into conversational intelligence to help teams make faster, better informed decisions. Off-screen, at the Tribeca Film Festival premiere of the Audible Original What Could Go Wrong?, Finn—who also leads experiential activations—had the podcast’s AI character Lexter craft cocktails and participate in a Q&A with series creator Scott Z. Burns.
Amy Fox
At Blis, part of T-Mobile Advertising Solutions, Amy Fox led the creation of the media buying platform Blis AI, which lets advertisers upload their briefs in plain language and instantaneously receive research-backed audience and partnership suggestions. She also integrated AI into Blis’ planning, buying, and measurement practices to fast-track strategic decision-making, taking AI out of the ethereal to drive real-world business results. And as traditional tracking and targeting signals disappear, she harnessed AI to power Dynamic Audience Targeting, which can pinpoint likely customers even in non-ID environments like Safari so effectively that T-Mobile acquired Blis last year.
Arthur Fullerton
Heading up AI across Havas, Arthur Fullerton helps brands take AI from one-off experiments to product strategies that shape customer experiences and brand perception. One hotel client saw a 25% lift in site visits after implementing an AI content engine designed by Fullerton; next up is an AI-infused transformation of a global financial services client. The agency network’s Meaningful AI Index, which stems from Fullerton’s research that AI-generated content “feels too perfect to trust,” guides clients in designing AI-powered work that still feels meaningful. Internally and externally, he is committed to AI governance, establishing standards and guardrails that protect brand integrity.
Rajeev Goel
Rajeev Goel was an early adopter of AI, betting big on Nvidia in 2020 for a multi-year collaboration that powers 1 millisecond decisioning and five times faster bidding. Over the past year, Goel has transformed the PubMatic platform by making AI fundamental to its processes. Thanks to intelligence-enabled tools, early users reported 87% quicker setups, 70% faster troubleshooting, and improved decisioning. Goel was especially instrumental to the platform’s AI-powered Live Sports Marketplace, which lets buyers purchase ads in real time during major sports moments. On the other side, he also increased win rates, improved pacing, and launched Butler/Till’s first fully agentic campaign.
Srishti Gupta
Since joining Integral Ad Science in 2024, Srishti Gupta has fully integrated AI into the company’s strategy and product development plans. She oversaw launches of the Total Media Performance solution focused on quality path optimization, the Content Block List (a partnership with Meta) to help brands avoid unsuitable content, the Quality Attention Optimization product to measure real-time engagement, as well as an automated assistant. The company’s new Total Media Quality measurement suite and Social Optimization tools problem-solve by filtering images, audio, video, text, and social media so marketers can improve precision, reduce waste, and avoid AI slop.
Melinda Han Williams
Generating insights won’t be enough for the next phase of AI. The tools of the future will take action, and Melinda Han Williams is leading the development of agentic AI designed specifically for how marketers plan, build, and activate at scale. Dstillery’s DS-1 agentic AI uses a single conversational interface to analyze signals, conduct multimodal AI modeling, develop predictive audiences, and set plans into motion across platforms. Workflows that used to take three days have been compressed to under 10 minutes. Han Williams also led Dstillery’s ID-free targeting, which relies on machine learning instead of personal identifiers to predict impression value, and is the architect behind most of the ad targeting firm’s 25 patents.
Jeffrey Herzog
Search engine optimization is yesterday’s tech. The new era of AI optimization (AIO) demands shaping how your brand shows up in AI platforms, redefining how visibility, influence, and relevance are earned. At Avenue Z, CEO Jeffrey Herzog has combined media placements, technical SEO, and strategic content into a new model for fostering consumer trust. One client, pediatric wellness brand Hiya Health, captured 15% share of voice in children’s vitamin queries and appeared in 88% of AI-generated related prompts. Herzog is also perfecting how to measure the output by pioneering the AI Visibility Index, which ranks brands across AI-driven discovery engines in a first-of-its-kind proprietary framework.
Jon Hyman
Customer engagement platform Braze leveled up its AI capabilities this year, with Hyman at the helm of three launches: BrazeAI Decisioning Studio, BrazeAI Agent Console, and BrazeAI Operator. Taco Bell nearly tripled campaign performance after tapping Decisioning Studio for personalized engagement, and Aeroflow got new moms the postpartum tech they needed seamlessly with Agent Console, which understands natural language for smoother customer conversations. Hyman also led Braze’s integration with Snowflake Cortex AI for additional insights and champions AI use internally for streamlined processes, cost-cutting, and fewer dependencies. Clients such as Asos, Canva, Hinge, and TurboTax trust Hyman and his team for data solutions that drive revenue.
Chetan Kandhari
In October, insurance giant Nationwide announced a $1.5 billion investment in technology through 2028, with $100 million dedicated specifically to AI each year. The goal is to have 90% of employees using everyday AI platforms in 2026 for tasks like claims, underwriting, inspections, and more. Chetan Kandhari—who has been with the company since 2005 and in the CDO role since 2020—is responsible for steering those funds, as well as the organization’s digital transformation. His Human in the Loop approach ensures AI does the heavy lifting while real people monitor the work, so customers still get high-quality service.
Michael Komasinski
Since becoming CEO in 2025, Michael Komasinski has sharpened Criteo’s deep-learning models and recommendation systems with the development of its Model Context Protocol layer; now, brands can seamlessly weave AI into how customers are shopping online. His work to make the company a leader in agentic commerce emphasizes conversational interfaces and leans heavily on data to provide only the most trusted, relevant recommendations, ensuring Criteo as a source of truth as AI-assisted shopping continues to grow. Komasinski is also the brains behind Commerce Go, now in use by more than 4,000 clients around the world to quickly produce full-service, cross-channel, AI-driven campaigns.
Nicolas Le Pallec
With LLMs and other AI tools cannibalizing search traffic, clients are turning to Nicolas Le Pallec and his team at AKQA EMEA to develop savvy AI assistants for luxury online spaces that enhance the customer journey. Le Pallec, who has been with the agency for more than a decade, has established new vector databases that can pull relevant info based on meaning and intent (not just keyword matches) and draw from historical data. Under his direction, AKQA EMEA also created an AI-powered ecommerce platform that responds dynamically and makes use of memory, narrative, and context. By playing into mood and moments, he’s infusing the emotion of real world shopping into digital retail.
Amy Lenander
What’s in your data strategy? Just ask Amy Lenander, who has been with the bank since 2003 and stepped into her newest role in 2023. The Fortune 50 company was an early cloud and AI adopter, and Lenander has continued to champion data-driven decision-making across the institution as its first CDO. In her mission of changing banking for good, she’s particularly keen on empowering people to reach their financial goals, whether that looks like sending AI-assisted payment reminders to help support good credit habits or launching the new automotive Chat Concierge, which helps car buyers compare vehicles and schedule appointments with sales teams.
Kelly MacLean
A former professional soccer player, Kelly MacLean is still hitting goals—just this time, off the field, at Amazon Ads. Across the online retail and media giant’s advertising ecosystem, she’s building agentic AI solutions to deliver on business objectives at scale. In the past year, she launched new AI adtech tools that streamline campaign management and led direct integrations with services such as Roku, Disney, Netflix, and Spotify so advertisers could get access to premium streaming TV and audio together with the visibility provided by Amazon’s retail data. Next up: prioritizing how Amazon Ads can expand AI capabilities and moving beyond traditional channels to reach more non-endemic advertisers.
Mike Manheimer
Mike Manheimer fixed one of AI’s biggest pain points: infusing brand identity into generic content. Thanks to his AI Infinity Testing, marketers can build and test thousands of text variations and adjust messaging in real time. Last year, he guided personal care brand Dr. Squatch through testing that kept their AI persona Chad front and center. Within 12 months, the brand saw over $500,000 in revenue from AI-tested messages, plus 91% more clicks and a 23% increase in conversions. Manheimer is also big on empowering retailers to do their own testing (instead of relying on tech teams) and hosts webinars to help ecommerce businesses make new tools work for them.
Chris Marino
With previous experience on the brand side at American Express and Bloomberg, Chris Marino knows how to craft AI solutions that appease both agency and client. That cross expertise is an asset for his role at Google, where he shepherds East Coast agencies through today’s complex media landscape. Marino’s insights also drove the creation of Google’s global measurement framework, which lets agencies use AI-powered systems in their own workflows to boost revenue. He’s a firm believer in empowering the next generation of marketers and mentors students at his undergrad alma mater, Syracuse, as well as Cornell, where he earned his MBA.
Bert Marissen
Bert Marissen brought the Jack in the Box menu off the page with DealQuest, an AI-powered “choose your own adventure” game in the restaurant’s app where users fend against “AI Munchie Meals” to win deals and prizes. To drive engagement and revenue, Marissen made sure fans felt like they were having fun—not being pushed by the brand—with personalized prompts and layered storytelling. Players nabbed 1.3 million deals through the game, with a 46% completion rate, showing that the wins were translating even after the game ended. Whether executing internal or external projects, Marissen is led by a simple guiding principle: “Is AI allowing me to do something I otherwise couldn’t do before?”
Tim McCracken
AI isn’t just an efficiency play for Tim McCracken. He’s using artificial intelligence as a catalyst for rethinking systems and unlocking bolder ideas that deliver results. His AI leadership at BarkleyOKRP landed McCracken an official AI role after the agency recognized it as a creative discipline worthy of ownership. He has shown how magic can happen when AI is led by strong creative judgement. By integrating Google Cloud AI capabilities, he helped soda brand Slice use AI to fully generate and scale a ‘90s radio universe with music, DJs, and video content, earning 119 million impressions, and drove FOMO for the Salvation Army with dynamic ads for sold items.
Sharon Milz
News organizations don’t get to be 103 years old without adapting to new technologies. Time magazine has embraced AI across its marketing ecosystem. Driving the effort is Sharon Milz, who has worked to embed AI into everyday decision-making, content and campaign workflows, media planning, and budget allocation. She’s also raised the bar on AI literacy for marketing teams while instituting strong guardrails tailored to Time’s unique marketing and content environment. Teams now spend less time on manual, high-friction workflows and more time on the good stuff, including strategy, creative thinking, and relationship-building. Under her watch, AI has become scalable, measurable, and trustworthy, while strengthening its marketing narratives and offerings for Time’s advertisers and partners.
Christian Monberg
Since his first AI marketing patent in 2015, Christian Monberg has helped drive AI’s significant momentum in the industry. His innovations at martech vendor Zeta Global include AI agents that can autonomously create campaigns, assess performance, and develop full email strategies within the Zeta Marketing Platform. Monberg also led the launch of Athena by Zeta, an agentic AI interface that learns from its users, removing the friction between humans and AI by turning conversational inputs into actions that drive the bottom line. For retailer The Aaron’s Company, these tools drove a marketing realignment that added nearly 2,400 net new customers in eight weeks with 33% lower acquisition costs.
Mike O’Donnell
Mike O’Donnell leads Flywheel’s AI Acceleration Team, helping Omnicom’s retail agency deploy AI across its operations. Under O’Donnell’s leadership, the ecommerce shop, which works with brands to help them sell on digital marketplaces, now has 1,200 custom-built AI agents across its workflows. The company added an AI chatbot to Flywheel Commerce Cloud that lets users generate reports and gain insights in seconds. AI-powered BI models have turned its Retail Insights platform into one of Flywheel’s top engines for retail intelligence. And a conversational Slack bot helps teams save time by scouring conversations to quickly answer questions and summarize key points.
Ndidi Oteh
Ndidi Oteh bridges the worlds of creativity, technology, and culture as CEO of Accenture Song, the creative arm of Accenture. She’s spearheaded a $3 billion AI investment portfolio that has significantly elevated Song’s capabilities and client offerings. Internally, this includes doubling down on research and analytics with investments in AI startups Wevo and Alembic, and integrating prediction engine Aaru’s Lumen model into its AI products to better anticipate consumer behavior. Externally, it’s applied its learnings to help Vodafone, Nestlé, and other clients derive returns from their own AI investments, and helped cut Mondelēz’s content production time by more than a third with a custom genAI solution.
Ravi Patel
One of programmatic advertising’s greatest inefficiencies is the sell-side decisioning layer, which determines which ads to show and how much to charge. Ravi Patel has been a driving force in bringing AI to this layer, building the industry’s first AI-native sell-side decisioning engine through his startup Swym. The system takes an innovative approach to supply path optimization by continuously learning from buy-side outcomes to not only identify the best inventory but also reshape supply, reducing waste and driving efficiency upstream. When Patel put this hypothesis to the test, Swym helped reduce CPA by 57% for Butler/Till and OpenX.
Jackie Paulino
Jackie Paulino is Pixability’s resident generative AI evangelist, helping to scale adoption and understanding of genAI tools across the video ad platform, both internally and externally. Paulino led the creation of Pixie, an AI agentic engine that helps brands identify brand-safe YouTube content while achieving greater reach, clickthrough rates, and speed to launch. Pixability’s suite of AI agents has helped the company’s teams and clients drive efficiency, performance, and insights in video inventory curation, reporting, and media-planning. A born educator, Paulino has helped improve AI knowledge and adoption at Pixability and the greater industry at large as a guest speaker at conferences and industry podcasts.
Bhagyesh Phanse
For Bhagyesh Phanse, AI is at its best when it is invisible, working seamlessly in the background to support human connections, execution, and growth. Phanse leads development of AI, machine learning, and generative AI algorithms through the Starbucks Data & Analytics Hub, with the goal of using AI to bolster the Starbucks experience for employees and customers. For example, Starbucks’ new virtual assistant, Green Dot Assist, makes employees’ jobs easier by using AI to provide fast answers to questions about recipes or service standards. Before joining Starbucks, Phanse held executive analytics roles at CVS and Macy’s, using the power of data science to drive growth.
Rajiv Ragu
AI is helping wellness supplement maker Thorne connect with new and existing customers on a deeper level. Growth SVP Rajiv Ragu is integrating AI across Thorne’s growth marketing apparatus. AI workflows are identifying creative ideas and narratives that resonate with consumers, and AI-powered audience building and personalization are better matching messaging to relevant customers. Ragu is also helping Thorne boost visibility in AI search experiences by centering its strategy on intent, context, and entity-led prioritization. His efforts are paying off with greater reach and brand trust, including a 66% LLM mention rate and 30% increase in organic revenue.
Marissa Ramirez
Marissa Ramirez is helping brands, retailers, and publishers use AI to create new kinds of ad experiences. Under Ramirez’s leadership, Shopsense AI is showing how AI-powered video, audio, image, and text analysis can turn moments of inspiration into contextually relevant purchase opportunities for brands. The platform uses AI to scan video, image, and text-based content and retailers’ feed data. Using this intel, it delivers Sponsored Product placements that enhance the user experience, rather than interrupt it. Consumers find products they love, brands gain visibility, and media companies generate revenue.
Kirthiga Reddy
In reimagining marketing and advertising for an AI-first world, Kirthiga Reddy blazed a trail as founding managing director of Meta India & South Asia, emerging markets lead for global partnerships at Meta HQ, and SoftBank Vision Fund’s first female investing partner. Now she is leading the shift from human-driven search to AI-mediated discovery as CEO and co-founder at OptimizeGEO.ai, which helps brands reach consumers who use AI tools to find new products. As she works to turn generative engine optimization into an operational marketing discipline, she’s also supporting women innovators in India with AI Kiran, a national initiative she founded to empower women working in AI.
Camm Rowland
Perhaps the only creative officer who also has AI in his title, Camm Rowland is pushing the creative industry to redefine their role for sustained success. He was the architect behind Kepler’s Content Engine, merging audience insights, performance data, and AI-assisted design to produce dynamic, channel-ready work without losing brand integrity, all guided by human judgment. To ensure responsible AI use, Rowland builds governance and ethical guidelines that protect brand authenticity and avoid copyright issues. Last year, Rowland’s Kip AIR, a first-to-market GEO analysis and optimization offering, was instrumental to apparel brand Rhone selecting Kepler as media AOR.
Ahmed Saad
Ahmed Saad is a pioneer in AI-driven product placement and in-content advertising, backed by a long list of patents and research papers. At Amazon, he led machine learning and computer vision teams to advance automated virtual product placement in film. As Rembrand co-founder, Saad refined his model with Regenerative Fusion AI technology for in-scene video augmentation to give brands control over how their products are represented in contextually relevant scenes “pixel perfectly.” Since launching in 2023, it’s powered hundreds of campaigns across video platforms and CTV, delivering impressive results while making product placement programmable, affordable, and scalable.
Clara Shih
When some of the tech industry’s largest players needed to launch and scale their AI products and business lines, they turned to Clara Shih. She built Meta’s Business AI Group and Salesforce’s generative AI platform, and founded Hearsay Systems, an AI-powered client engagement platform for sales reps that was acquired by Yext in 2024. Shih has also been an investor and advisor to exciting AI startups such as Moltbook (OctaneAI), answer engine Perplexity, and observability platform Braintrust. Born in Hong Kong before immigrating to the United States at age 4, Shih is an advocate for women in tech and has authored bestselling business books.
Natalie Silverstein
Natalie Silverstein recognized that creator marketing and AI were converging. To bridge the gap, she launched Chorus to help Collectively’s clients understand how they’re discussed in LLMs and use creator partnerships to influence results. Education is also key, so Silverstein launched the Gen AI Creator Residency Program, turning AI “maker creators” into trainers for agency teams at The Brandtech Group, Collectively’s parent company. Silverstein also built Collectively OS to act as the agency’s AI-powered operational backbone, helping the agency achieve 25% faster campaign setup and scale revenue. A sought-after thought leader and keynote speaker, Silverstein regularly advises C-suite executives on AI’s intersection with creator marketing and strategic use.
Fidji Simo
As a longtime Facebook executive, Fidji Simo led development of the app’s vaunted news feed and mobile advertising machines. After a decade, she joined Instacart as CEO, taking the grocery delivery app public and leading an AI transformation aimed at creating deeper, more personalized grocery shopping experiences. Last year, Fidji joined OpenAI as CEO of Applications, overseeing its business and operations teams as it embarks on its next stage of growth, which will include advertising. Simo is passionate about AI and its potential to solve problems, particularly in healthcare, which is personal for Simo, who co-founded the Metrodora Institute and Foundation to support people with neuroimmune disorders.
Jason Alan Snyder
Futurist and inventor Jason Alan Snyder is helping to change how the marketing industry understands and applies AI to creativity and strategy. His work as the first global chief AI officer at IPG’s Momentum Worldwide reframed AI as an enabler of creativity rather than a mere automation tool. He was also an early leader in integrating adaptive data frameworks with proprietary AI models, creating landmark activations for Verizon, Coca-Cola, and American Express. Now at his own creative technology and experiential agency Artists & Robots, and as chair of the 4As AI Committee, Snyder continues to demonstrate how AI can supercharge human work.
Nicholas Spiro
Nicholas Spiro is a big believer in using AI to transform brand safety and performance in creator marketing. Under his direction, Viral Nation is building AI-powered solutions that could unlock more brand budgets for the channel. Viral Nation Secure, built on Google Gemini, provides comprehensive brand safety with 22-year historical scans of creator backgrounds, while frame-by-frame video analyses assess social content risk at scale. The same tech can surface deeper insights that elevate social campaign performance. For one major North American retailer managing over 100,000 creator partnerships, his platform processed 88 years’ of content, saving 195,000 manual review hours while achieving 7x faster vetting.
Chan Suh
Starting with $80 and two people, Chan Suh built Agency.com into an 1,800-employee global powerhouse. He’s now leading AI transformation at Prophet, where his core thesis is that AI’s greatest value is in removing the barriers that hold back informed decision-making for marketers. Prophet helped a global footwear brand use AI-powered digital twins to quickly test creative concepts, providing a continuous feedback loop and slashing creative development timelines by 60%. Suh is now guiding Prophet’s development of its Maia platform, which can help clients implement AI-driven marketing workflows. The tech might also be licensed to other consultancies, which would shift Prophet from advisory services to scalable AI infrastructure.
Scott Terry
Scott Terry is a trusted voice on generative AI’s legal and ethical implications for marketers. In his role at 72andSunny, Terry helps clients understand the intellectual property risks associated with AI, as well as legal and regulatory considerations. Terry created the agency’s global generative AI guidelines, establishing standards for transparency, copyright safety, and ethical use across markets. His framework guides teams in using AI for concept development, pitches, and strategy while minimizing risk. Terry also loves to experiment with AI and has created AI-generated films that have earned recognition at festivals such as the Tokyo International Short Film Festival and Southeast Asia International Film Festival.
Amy Thorne
A champion of human-first workflows, Amy Thorne fosters responsible AI adoption in marketing. As chief future officer, she is leading Dentsu Creative’s AI transformation, designing systems that blend creative work, media, and technology while keeping people at the center. Thorne has a knack for using AI to bring media and creative closer together. Her many accomplishments include rolling out Adobe GenStudio dentsu+, a joint solution that uses AI to help brands automate workflows, scale content production, and boost effectiveness by as much as 30%. Thorne is also a proponent of talent upskilling, leading to training programs and new types of roles to future-proof the agency.
Leilanni Todd
While some worry AI will stifle creativity, Leilanni Todd is embracing AI to discover new possibilities for storytelling and visual content. The creative director and digital artist is recognized as a leading thinker in the use of AI in creative work, with a deep background that spans advertising, fashion, 3D animation, and filmmaking. She’s the brainchild behind Floam World, a delightfully surreal storytelling universe packed with original IP. Todd’s work with agencies and brands includes Puma’s first AI-driven campaign and AI-assisted footwear design. She joined Darren Aronofsky’s Primordial Soup as consulting creative director to advance AI-assisted cinematic storytelling, with one of her films being shown at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Misbah Uraizee
Misbah Uraizee created her first online shop for a Los Angeles jewelry store when she was 13. To put herself through Yale, she built web apps for small businesses and nonprofits before going on to work at Meta building its creator and community engines. Today, she crafts agentic operating systems for social commerce as co-founder and CEO of Nectar. The AI platform uses agents to help brands like Jones Road Beauty, Caraway, and Olipop manage community interactions, track brand sentiment, and connect social engagement to sales. Since launching in June, Nectar has helped clients boost DM response rates and conversion in DMs by 80% and 12%, respectively.
Shobhit Varshney
Shobhit Varshney never stops trying to learn new things so he can help his clients outthink disruption. He was named a Champion Learner at IBM, completing more than 200 learning hours a year. During his 13 years at IBM, he executed large AI transformation projects in the U.S., Canada, and Latin America. He headed to Citi in 2025 to help the bank scale AI tools across its workforce and spearhead AI strategy, execution, and value creation. Varshney is a frequent guest speaker at conferences, companies, and universities, and he holds multiple patents related to the internet of things, self-assembling algorithms, sales optimization, and market share prediction.
Erika Sheridan & Kaare Wesnaes
Here’s how Kaare Wesnaes and Erika Sheridan approach AI: Never treat the machine as the magician. The pair take a human-centered approach to drive AI adoption across Ogilvy North America, where their pioneering Spark & Sustain framework has touched more than 2,000 employees. Continuous training that sparks curiosity and sustains AI in everyday workflows has helped the agency achieve 78% adoption of WPP Open, WPP’s AI-powered platform. By treating people, not machines, as leaders, Wesnaes and Sheridan are turning AI literacy into competitive advantage, strengthening client relationships, and establishing new industry standards for responsible AI adoption.
Justin Wexler
At WndrCo, a technology-focused investment firm that calls itself the “founders behind the founders,” Justin Wexler oversees enterprise AI investments—and the practical realities of how to help Fortune 500 C-suite leaders implement them. He’s boosted buzzy startups Writer, Alembic, and Netomi, which have released some of the marketing industry’s most widely adopted AI technologies: Writer reached a $1.9 billion valuation, Alembic raised over $145 million in a Series B round, and Netomi’s tech has been implemented by Marriott, Mars, and American Eagle. Wexler has also helped legacy companies like Delta, Mars, Disney, and Paramount move from AI theory to real workflows.
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